9781529108248

Cheer the F **K Up

Cheer the F **K Up How to Save Your Best Friend

JACK ROOKE

In memory of Laurie, Sicely and Olly

To my best mate, Lewis, for always being there.

To my brother, Dean, for turning anger and sadness into courage and bravery.

And to my mum, Josie, who, despite losing the love of her life, somehow kept our home as warm and loving as it ever was. Who got nuggets, chips and beans on the table every day at 5pm. Who’d watch A Place in the Sun with me on the sofa, a fag in one hand and a Müller Light yoghurt in the other – just riding the waves of whatever life threw at us. She’ll get a free copy of this book, but I know she’ll still go and buy one from Waterstones in Watford, because the shop makes her feel posh, so I’ll see you in there x

1 Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road London SW1V 2SA Ebury Press is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

Copyright © Jack Rooke 2020 Jack Rooke has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published by Ebury Press in 2020 Paperback edition published by Ebury Press in 2022 www.penguin.co.uk A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 9781529108248 Typeset in 9.9/15.66 pt Sabon LT Pro

by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd, Pondicherry Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. The authorised representative in the EEA is Penguin Random House Ireland, Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street, Dublin D02 YH68 Penguin Random House is committed to a sustainable future for our business, our readers and our planet. This book is made from Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper.

Contents About this book

1

Growing up

9

The family do’s

19

School run

23

150 days

37

A statue

43

How to support a friend who’s found out a parent or loved one has cancer

47

During Dad’s cancer

51

Josephine

63

How to support a friend who’s just lost a parent/close loved one Lasagne

65 67

Bullshit things you shouldn’t say to the severely bereaved on the day of a funeral

77

Back to normal

79

Magic powers

81

Get Out of Class card

83

Sam

95

GarageBand

97

Bereavement counsellor

101

How to help someone find bereavement counselling

115 ix

Cheer the F**k Up

Bubbles

123

How to support a friend on their first night out after they’ve been through shit Prom

129 133

How to help a loved one on a painful anniversary 137 Sixth form

141

Big fat liar

151

Moving-in day

157

How to support someone who you’re leaving behind

165

Flat 83

167

Free shit

175

Pre-drinks

181

Messi Mondayz

185

The first six months of being a gay

189

How to help a loved one accept their sexuality Shit poems

201 207

How to encourage creativity/community as cartharisis

213

Condoms and calmzines

217

Meeting Olly

223

The Olympically gay summer of 2012 – part one

229

How to survive your first gay club visit

251

The Olympically gay summer of 2012 – part two

259

How to tell a friend about your sexuality

263

Bakerloo blues

265

How to know if a friend is the right person to move in with

271

The pubs of Kilburn – part one x

273

Contents

The pubs of Kilburn – part two

281

First gay Pride

287

How to spot some early signs of mental health issues in loved ones (and help them to open up and get help)

291

CALM volunteering

299

Final year of uni

305

Broke with expensive taste

311

How to tell work or uni that you need time off

315

Deadline day

317

My nan, Sicely

321

Graduation and prank calls

325

Good grief

331

Coffin boy

339

The pitch

343

Shamil

347

Goodbye

351

How to help someone bereaved by a suicide

353

Good grief, Edinburgh 2015

363

Bridget Jones and the local newspaper

367

Success and failure

373

Mental breakdown cover

383

How not to be scared

389

Support

395

Acknowledgements

401

xi

about this book Hello you! Somehow you’ve ended up with a book entitled Cheer The F**K Up and who knows if that says more about you than it does about me! Either way, I am thrilled to be the hot young daddy of this new paperback edition.

You may know me from my live comedy-theatre shows, BBC Radio and telly shows on grief, or as the creator-narrator of Channel 4’s sitcom series Big Boys. You may also know me as the guy creeping out of your flatmate Tom’s bedroom at 8am and bidding you an awkward stranger’s farewell on the stairs. (Spoiler alert – this author is a homosexual.

SHOCK! HORROR! CRASH! WALLOP! God I wish he’d stop banging on about it already!1)

If you are a homophobe, please burn this book safely in an open green space away from low-hanging branches and children. If you’re lucky, you might even see some cruising going on!

1

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Cheer the F**k Up

You may also not have a single fucking clue who I am, and for me, that is the most exciting demographic for you to be in.

I’m Jack and in 2019 I hid myself away from civilisation to write this publication, staying inside my flat with numerous tubes of each flavour of Pringles. I finally left my dark cave in March 2020 to hand in the final copy to Penguin and begin reintegrating myself into society. Then Ms. Rona had some other ideas and I immediately went back into the cave, this time with numerous bottles of Dettol spray to wipe down my Pringles. And whilst on lockdown, I realised a lot of the themes I’d written about – grief, loss and supporting loved ones in the toughest circumstances – became even more relevant.

This whole book is ultimately a comedic-memoir-meetsadvice-guide, about losing my dad at fifteen, losing a close friend to suicide at twenty-one and losing a pair of Nike Air Max 95s on a Northern Line tube (Bank branch) at twentyfive. A real smorgasbord of trauma, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Many of the stories are taken from my Edinburgh live shows and explore topics such as, but not limited to: joining the ‘dead dad club’, confused sexuality, mental health, using sympathy to get free stuff, shagging, taking drugs, anxiety, finding the right counsellor/therapist, watching ITV daytime programming, surviving freshers’ week, making shit songs on GarageBand, writing shit grief poems on Microsoft Word, comfort eating, parents, the Edinburgh Fringe, my deep love of Alison Hammond and the rapper M.I.A, property guardianships, suicide, masculinity, music festivals, 2

Contents

Grindr hook-ups, cancer, comedy, and most importantly – friendship.

This book is, above all, an ode to silly, loving, fi zzy, stupid, unadulterated, messy, spontaneous, letting-someonehave-your-free-McDonalds-hamburger-that-you-got-withyour-NUS-student-card friendship.

I’ve rounded off a lot of the stories with advice guides full of tips from me, which all essentially boil down to ‘how best to help a friend going through a shit time’. Some of these tips are designed to make you laugh and some of them to spark off ideas. I know that I’ve been that friend, had that friend and sadly lost that friend, and I think most of us have that one mate we’re just that bit more worried about.

Brief examples of my friends who I worry about include: • The one who divulges ‘juicy’ details of their sex life far too loudly in public eating areas.

• The one who has bought a few too many sequined clothes off ASOS in the hope of feeling footloose, when actually they just need some CBT.2 • The one who doesn’t always order a chicken katsu curry in Wagamama.

However you may have that one friend – who could also be a relative, loved one, sibling or partner - where the issue is something a bit deeper and harder to broach. They may have lost a close loved one, may be struggling with their 2

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy – more on this later.

3

Cheer the F**k Up

sexuality, or might be feeling overwhelmed with symptoms of depression, anxiety and mental illness. I really hope there is something in this book that helps you feel more confident in giving them the best support whilst also looking after you. Quite frankly you could also be reading this book just to help yourself and if so, great! I’ve tried to write this so everyone and anyone is welcome, so long as you promise to start only ordering katsu curries in Wagamama, because it would be hard for me to trust anyone who’d order anything else. 3 I can promise that unlike some mental health memoirs there will be no illustrations of dark rain clouds, clouds with sad illustrative faces in them, clouds with smiley faces in them nor any tiny sail boats on choppy seas. There will be no inspirational quotes, no stock image photography of people with their heads in their hands, nor any sentimental comment about how I hope this book can help just one person. That would be a lie. I hope this book helps at least 100 people and that one of them ends up becoming my husband, or else, really, what was the point? The only way I could reconcile with the self-indulgence of writing a memoir in my twenties, was to try and make it funny, silly and cynical at times, yet still sensitive, still a bit sad in places and hopefully still very useful.

Before I was doing any comedy or broadcasting, during my first year at university in 2012, I started volunteering at This book is not sponsored by Wagamama, but I’m very happy for them to take me on as a brand ambassador if anyone knows anyone.

3

4

About this book

the suicide prevention charity CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably). I’ve been a long-term ambassador, travelling with them up and down the country, from pitching ‘free tea and talk tents’ at festivals full of teenagers on MDMA comedowns to flying the CALM flag at their first LGBTQ+ Pride, to meeting Princes William and Harry in the gardens of Kensington Palace to kick off their Heads Together mental health initiative. I don’t think either of those two were on an MDMA comedown at the time, but had they been, I would’ve had some reassuring words of comfort at the ready. (Mainly stay calm and focus your mind on something positive if you start to feel panicky, Harry.) I’ve also written columns for CALM, thrown numerous fundraising gigs for them, and over the years I’ve stood behind hundreds of popup tables giving out thousands of leaflets, badges and advice sheets, speaking to people who’ve been affected by various mental health issues and hearing about how they’ve come out the other side of it.

Though whilst I have some experience, I do want to state clearly that I am not a psychotherapist or psychiatrist. I’m just a boy, standing in front of a reader, via the medium of paper or audio-book, asking you to love him/at least read beyond page forty. (And then leave a nice Amazon review if you enjoyed it!) All I can do is share what I’ve learnt and trust you to take away whatever you want, so long as it’s to help yourself or support a friend.

Ultimately, the reason I wanted to write this book is because I think we are living through a time period where the onus is increasingly being placed upon us as individuals 5

Cheer the F**k Up

to be mental health supports for one another. The clarion call of ‘time to talk’ has continuously increased in volume through mainstream conversations around mental health and yet Britain has increasingly long waiting lists for talking therapies, funding cuts to NHS mental health/ early intervention services and high suicide stats in some demographics – all made harder to tackle during the pandemic.

4

Discussions that should be taking place in therapy rooms or within safe earshot of a trained mental health professional are now happening in our nation’s living rooms and not all of us feel equipped for this or know how to help. With many young people unable to afford private therapy and treatment, I’ve heard more and more from loved ones feeling under immense pressure to ‘save’ those who haven’t been able to access help when they’ve needed it. So whilst we’ve rightly encouraged people to open up, we haven’t properly provided those hearing these admissions of depression, anxiety, mental illness etc., with the right reactions, solutions or things to say. Nor have we given people the strength to cope with any of their own anxiety, guilt and/or shame that may stem from someone else’s sadness. And so there is a very real fear in being that loved one – a fear of getting it wrong, saying the wrong thing and making matters worse for someone.

This is why I’ve called the book Cheer the Fuck Up. Whilst that phrase can be an insensitive, lazy dismissal to Recent stats from the Office for National Statistics (published September 2019) sadly show increases in suicide rates for young men, young women and those from more vulnerable backgrounds.

4

6

About this book

throw at someone struggling, I’ve also found it can be said out of sheer love, desperation, heartache, anger, exhaustion, despair, frustration and – most crucially – fear. We often forget how much love involves fear and the desire to protect those we love. And so in a schmaltzy, drunk uncle at Christmas wanting to give you good advice way – I really do hope this book helps reduce the fear.

Finally, I wanted these stories to be a celebratory tribute to my dad and my friend Olly and I hope that maybe it gives you some space to celebrate someone you’ve lost too. And who knows, maybe you will become that one reader out of a hundred who feels helped by this book and thus, as a result, will someday become my life partner. Good luck to all of us, I say.

Jack x P.S If any potential husbands want to drop me a line, you can find me @jackrooke on twitter, or @jackdaverooke on Instagram.

7

growing up As a child, my favourite book was the Argos catalogue.

In the mid-nineties, me and my cousins used to have a catalogue each – the true bible for any three- to ten-year-old working-class child. As soon as the Autumn/Winter edition was available to pick up, we would all sit and scrawl circles around five or six presents with a biro, ranging from one big present (over £50) to a scattering of small presents. Then, our personal catalogues, which all had our names on, would be collected in mid-November, in time for the aunties to gather round a kitchen table like a coven, distributing product number catalogue codes to one another for purchase. This meant the Christmas presents could be bought in one place, in one efficient order, with everyone getting exactly what they’d asked for so that no one could ‘fucking moan’ on Jesus’s birthday. It was total genius.

We would still make the holy pilgrimage to Watford’s Harlequin shopping centre each Christmas, to traipse around staring at festive window displays before getting a

9

Cheer the F**k Up

round of McDonald’s Happy Meals in for the way home, clawing at my cousin Amy’s eyeballs if she got a better free toy than me. But, as for our Christmas presents, they had already been bought, wrapped and name tagged before we’d opened the first window on our advent calendars, and with far more efficiency than anything I’ve been able to achieve nowadays as an adult man.

Around the age of three or four, you could have asked me about my family and I would have told you that I had two wonderful parents, Chris Evans and Vanessa Feltz. My extended family included glamorous Aunty Pat (Butcher), my northern Uncle Les (Battersby) and my various cousins Zippy, Dipsy and Wellard the German shepherd. This is what I earnestly told people on the bus in the mid-1990s, during a childhood spent obsessed with television.

In reality my parents were my dad, Laurie, a curly-haired black cab driver with a penchant for spearmint polos and Kronenbourg, and my mother, Josie, a fellow curly-haired multi-grafter who did any job she could get, with a penchant for starting the crossword in the TV guide but then asking if I could finish it off, because, even aged six, I was the better speller. (I should clarify at this point, as some of my friends have been confused by some of this: by ‘black cab driver’, I mean the driver of a London black cab, and not his race.)

Together, these two curly-haired lovers from estates just north-west of London created the most curly-haired chubby white kid you’ve ever seen. I was like Roald Dahl’s Matilda – a bit of a misfit. I loved reading and talking and irritating the fuck out of everyone with incessant lines of questioning.

10

Growing up

I hated football and conflict and anyone not answering my every request for information. However, unlike Matilda, I was incredibly loved by my parents and only possessed one magical power – to spill drinks in public places with total ease, to the raging annoyance of my dad.

I’d say I had the loveliest childhood. I was quite lucky compared to my two brothers, who were born twentyone and thirteen years before me, when my mum and dad were skint, grafting their arses off and in their teens/early twenties, still trying to figure the world out. I came about when they’d just turned forty, had some savings in the bank, a TV with all four channels and could spend quality time with me growing up.

As a very young child, I lived in a place called Mill End, a predominantly working-class area made up almost entirely of social housing and football pubs, with the junction 17 to 18 stretch of the M25 concreted bang through the middle.

Mill End is next to little pockets of villages all harbouring million-pound estates, where famous people like Sacha Baron Cohen, Ronan Keating or Martin Kemp lived. One day my mum bumped trolleys with David Seaman in Tesco and had a hot flush. She had to sit down.

We lived in a block of flats next to a little parade of shops, a Methodist church where Fearne Cotton once attended a christening and a pub called the Happy Man, which burnt down on my eleventh birthday. Nowadays I think it quite ironic to name a pub the Happy Man when a lot of the blokes inside were miserable, overworked heavy-drinkers.

Away from the pub, however, people in the community 11

Cheer the F**k Up

were genuinely very happy. There was more of a feeling of warmth in Mill End than many places I’ve lived as an adult.

It was in the kindness of smiles as you popped to the shops to buy some fags for a random aunty. In the silent agreement that the ‘No Ball Games’ sign was to be ignored at all times. It was in the opening of pub crisp packets at the side rather than the top so everyone could share.1 It was in the scattering of kids’ pedal bikes and mini-scooters around the park, where if you accidentally took some other lad’s bike home you’d just drop it round their house the next day. There’d be no passive-aggressive jobsworth mum complaining about it on the local Facebook group, trying to suggest some six-year-old was a mastermind petty criminal.

People just used their common sense.

My favourite thing about Mill End was that, every December, house-proud dads would spend far too much money on exterior Christmas lights in a neighbour-onneighbour competition too ‘tacky’ for the middle classes and surprisingly quite camp for such burly tattooed blokes, all of whom spent hours erecting a giant inflatable bearded silver muscle bear in front of their gaff. (Otherwise known as Santa.)

It wasn’t one of those areas where everyone had degrees or A-Levels or – as was the case in my family – more than three GCSEs, but emotional intelligence, resilience and a streetwise savviness was qualification enough. People looked I found it so strange when I got to university and was hanging out with middle-class kids in a pub that they’d buy a bag of crisps, open them and then keep them in their own hands, keeping the crisps to THEMSELVES! We before me please, this is not a Boots Meal Deal.

1

12

Growing up

out for each other, kept an eye out for those who needed it and always defended those they loved, even if they’d maybe done something wrong, in which case you’d still stick up for them, but privately clout them round the ear for being a dickhead.

Sadly, Mill End was seen by some snobby types from neighbouring, more affluent towns as a bit of a shithole. A bit more rough. But like most places deemed shitholes, it was a loved shithole. It was OUR shithole. Most shitholes in this country are actually incredibly lovable places at their very core and I think parts of Mill End are a really brilliant place to live and bring up kids in a community setting. Other bits, like many places in Britain built up with council housing, have been sadly neglected by greedy councils and a lack of government spending.

However, with the status of shithole comes a sometimes silent or implicit suggestion by certain types that these places are devoid of culture. That working-class people aren’t interested in literature or the arts. And this myth was best defied by one woman in my life: my Aunty Jenny.

Jenny was, and still is, an absolute fucking madwoman.

She was the Hyacinth Bucket of Mill End, you could say – the main one in my family who regularly read literature in front of me and religiously listened to Woman’s Hour on Radio 4, whilst also being a plasterer/decorator driving an estate car with ladders and power tools in the back. She constantly had – and still has – white Dulux paint in her hair and she can down a half pint of pure whisky like it’s going extinct.

She’s a bad bitch, that’s what I’m saying.

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When I was a kid, Jenny used to buy me children’s books, take me to see pantomimes or films or amateur theatre shows, and then we’d debate and critique the content of these in her Ford estate on the drive home. The only condition I had was that we listened to S Club 7 on the way there. She was adamant that class should not ever stop someone from achieving whatever they fucking well want to.

When I look across my family, all the women have had traditionally masculine job types, from my Aunty Marion, who headed up a bus depot in Bournemouth, to my Aunty Rose, who’s a paramilitary sniper working in volatile areas of conflict around the world.

Nah, I’m joking. She’s a dinner lady at my old school, but it’s a tiring job that she’s still doing at seventy years old, though the canteen can often feel like a volatile war zone if a Year 8 has lost their lunch card.

My mum, on the other hand, has had numerous jobs all throughout my childhood, from café worker to shampooing people’s hair in a salon to office cleaner to barmaid. I have memories of some quite well-off kids asking me at school ‘What does your mum do?’ and watching their shock as I explained she didn’t have one career – she was just a grafter. So many working-class women take on numerous jobs of varied skill levels because that’s what making ends meet demands and that’s what Mum had done for years before I came along.

It’s not about a job title, it’s just about having enough money to put food on the table for whoever is sat around it.

Now, me and my mum have always been incredibly close.

She’s like a cross between Gwen, from Gavin & Stacey, and 14

Growing up

Pam . . . from Gavin & Stacey. If you haven’t seen Gavin & Stacey, this just means my mum’s the sort of person who looks after everyone and jumps when the toaster pops unexpectedly. And whilst she’s the woman who gave birth to me (via forceps, sorry Mum!), washed my pants for years (sorry Mum!) and wiped Colgate toothpaste from my cheeks before school (thanks Mum!), she is also one of my best mates. One of the funniest, kindest people, with a hilarious tendency to get incredibly confused with masterful ease. For example, for her birthday last year I took her for dinner in a trendy restaurant and I found her in the gents toilets because she thought that the door which said ‘L’ stood for ‘Lads’ and the door with the ‘G’ stood for ‘Girls’ (sorry Mum!).

I feel very lucky to have been brought up with all these very vibrant, strong, no-shit women around me. Ultimately, women who’d had tough, difficult upbringings, without money or many further-education prospects. All of them worked their arses off to start families and gain more than what they’d had where they came from. And, on another level, I feel lucky that those women have also kept up brilliantly loud, unadulterated and filthy senses of humour and who can always banter as much, and likely with more ingenuity, than the men.

Growing up, it was often the blokes I saw who could be far too volatile and sensitive. I would see men down pubs who tended to conform to a strict masculine stereotype: English tattoos, England shirts, flying England flags even in off-years of the World Cup, newspapers open on a pair of English tits, England flag cigarette lighters – and so on.

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As a child, I had an underlying fear of being around overt, strict and defined masculinity, because it didn’t feel like something I conformed to. However, I still spent most of the late nineties and early 2000s trying to align myself with this out of a fear of appearing ‘girly’. From ages three to eleven I’d be dressed head-to-toe in bootleg sportswear from Bovingdon Market, an abandoned airfield just outside Hemel Hempstead where you could get knock-off anything.

I lived off pirate DVDs, bootleg Adidas tracksuits, fake Reebok trainers, Kelvin Klien pants and nylon Umbro shirts that would enhance my childhood puppy-fat breasts to the undeserving eye. I remember often thinking I was dressing like ‘my hero’, David Beckham, when in reality I looked much more like a dodgy Matt Lucas character from Little Britain, series one.2 I remember being so concerned through all of my childhood that I just wasn’t boyish enough. I loved pop music, the Spice Girls, the various gradients and shades of the colour pink, and magic. My mum always tells strangers how I never wanted a dummy or a blanket as a child but instead requested a magic wand in hand at all times. I slept with numerous magic wands. If I lost a magic wand, my dad would go to the park, find a stick, wrap it in black tape and Tipp-Ex the ends and . . . hey presto – Jack had a new magic wand. The gay signs were so obviously blaring out.

My brother Dean was the opposite. He’s thirteen years older, so when he was eighteen and figuring himself 2

I should say that, in reality, my hero was Geri Halliwell.

16

Growing up

out as a man, I was five, and I remember looking at him and seeing what it meant to go from boy to man. Often he told me that I needed to toughen up; casually telling me to be more of a ‘boy’. He spent hours teaching me how to form fi sts, telling me throughout my childhood that, if I ever needed anyone or anything ‘sorting out’, he would always be there. All this when I was only six and the only trouble I ran into was the odd snidey playground comment about being too chubby to get to the top of the climbing frame. All I wanted to do was watch CITV’s The Worst Witch with a mug of Options low-fat hot chocolate and sit doodling on a copy of my mum’s Take a Break magazine.

Obviously, Dean never realised the impact these statements would have on me, but it definitely meant that I knew from very early on that I wasn’t ever going to be your typical lad’s lad, the kind of boy who gets called by his surname with a -y added.

I should say that, now, as adults, me and Dean have a much better relationship, despite still being quite different.

I know he feels guilty about telling me to just stop being so wimpy all the time, but I also think his desire to toughen me up perhaps, weirdly, came out of love and fear, of knowing I was a bit different to the more ‘laddier’ boys and therefore might have it a bit harder.

And my earliest experiences of feeling different to other boys would always peak whenever we went down one place: the Mill End Community Centre for a ‘family do’.

17

the family do’s The Mill End Community Centre was an ex-primary school hall turned into a bar and function room, which hosted all the community’s big events: engagements, weddings, landmark birthdays, Weight Watchers weekly weigh-ins, funerals and shit kids’ parties. Think of the pub in Shameless but with fewer crisp options.

Every wedding, christening or even funeral of someone I barely knew would have a disco-lit dance floor. Most came with an old man stood behind it called Clive, who DJ’d for the night, interrupting each song with a banal anecdote about pop culture or sport or how this party can’t go on all night, he’s gotta get back to his wife!1 Family members would always try to get me to play with all the other boys, who’d be outside running around the car park kicking a football, but, aged around five, I would 1

Clive didn’t have a wife.

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Cheer the F**k Up

always want to be on the dance floor, requesting Clive put on the Spice Girls – something that, at twenty-five, I still ask many DJs in clubs to do today.

These family functions were always soundtracked by sing-a-long party hits like Dexy Midnight Runners’ ‘Come On Eileen’ or Barry Manilow’s ‘Oh Mandy’ or The Police’s ‘Rooooooooxanne’, meaning that the three women in our extended family called Eileen, Mandy and Roxy would get pointed, screamed and lurched at as soon as each song began.

By the chorus they’d be violently dragged into the middle of the floor like a member of One Direction attempting to walk past a Topshop sale. Then everyone would shout the lyrics of the song at them and the women in question would have to pretend to be loving it.

And despite the non-consensual forced dancing, and my occasional terror of these events, there was sometimes a real joy in running around in a room full of extended family, even if I mostly had no clue how they were related to me. I loved watching everyone mucking about to disco-infused party music. The seventies and eighties hits of Michael Jackson, followed by more Michael Jackson, before an old fashioned shout-a-long song, like ‘Is This the Way to Amarillo?’, before swiftly returning back to the then king of pop. One of our cousins married a man called Mike Jackson, but no one ever dragged him kicking and screaming to dance and that’s male privilege for you!

The other distinct sensory memory I have of Mill End family parties is the all-exciting finger buffet. There is nothing I love more in the world than a party finger-food buffet.

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The family do’s

Once you get over the anxiety of knowing everyone will judge who goes up first, you can strut up to the buffet table and immerse yourself in the tapas of processed shite in front of you. I always recommend twelve-plus items as the bare minimum for buffet etiquette and please do not even think about returning to your party table unless you’ve brought back a communal plate of cocktail sausages.

My buffet highlights included: chicken goujons with a nondescript red or brown dipping sauce that was diabetically sweet, mini veg samosas too spicy for all the elderly white people, so there was always plenty left, a cube of cheap cheese on a stick accompanied with a pineapple chunk and, finally, some cut-up carrots or cucumber which you’d add to the far side of your plate to give the illusion of healthy eating. If you did begin feasting on any of the vegetables, some random bloke would probably call you gay.

As a side point, I would also love to pay tribute to the introduction of sweet chilli sauce as a regular character of buffets around 2005/2006, which changed finger party food for ever! Everyone wanted a dip . . . except for my Uncle Saff, who was very suspicious of any food his palate was unused to. (One time he even refused to eat a lasagne I’d made, giving the reason that he didn’t eat spicy or foreign food, which was ironic considering a lot of my family are half Italian.)

Now, the point I wanted to make by taking you to a Mill End Community Centre party was that there was one man in and amongst the more macho blokes who never made me feel like I wasn’t enough of a boy. A man who didn’t make 21

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me feel like I was a bit gay for eating a carrot stick. And even though he loved his cars and his pubs and no doubt probably enjoyed the tits in the newspapers, he was the one man who always seemed to accept me purely for me and didn’t care what anyone thought.

My dad, Laurie.

22

school run When I was around four, we moved from Mill End just up the road to a small town on the Metropolitan Line called Chorleywood. By this point, my parents were now both in their mid-to-late forties, had actually earnt some money and had managed to get a house cheap, right at the start of the mid-nineties property boom.

Now they had their own slice of the suburbs, with a back garden, a short driveway and some slightly snobby neighbours, who found the exhaust rattle of my dad’s black cab to be far too noisy.

Chorleywood was a more affluent area, with the odd celebrity resident, many independent shops and a vanity twinning with a French town called Dardilly. Up until the age of eleven, I thought this meant they somehow found a town near Lyon which was completely identical!

I then went to a different primary school after nursery.

Everyone else in my family had gone to a primary school right in the middle of the estates of Mill End, whereas I went to a village school at the top of a hill of very nice houses. I 23

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remember only being about five, but it feeling like a culture shock. There was one incident in my reception class when everyone was sat on the classroom floor doing story time and I came in late and asked Miss Lee for a pillow.

She replied, ‘What do you mean, sorry?’

And I said, ‘A pillow, please.’

She replied, ‘Sorry Jack, I don’t have a pillar. There’s a pillar in the classroom but you can’t sit by that, you must join the circle.’

In frustration, I shouted, ‘No, I want a pillow!’ pointing at what all my classmates were sitting on.

‘Oh Jack, sorry, do you mean a pill-ow? A cushion?!’

I was pronouncing pillow like a cockney Victorian chimney sweeper. ‘Pill-ah’, like my dad shouting to Mum for an extra cushion whilst watching Top Gear. I didn’t realise I dropped my Ts and contracted all my words until I went to this rather quaint village primary school, and soon felt like a 1939 evacuee from Bromley-by-Bow. It was at this school that I made my longest-suffering best friend, Lewis. We met in September 1997, when Lewis witnessed me shit myself after I spilled three litres of poster paint on our classroom floor.1 I started crying with embarrassment, falling to my knees on the reception classroom’s low-pile blue carpet until the shitting came along

It was actually the exact day after Princess Diana died, but that didn’t feel relevant to include in the main body of text. I was four years old and, to be honest with you, you could have put Diana, Princess of Wales, Jill Dando and Anthea Turner all in a row and, back then, I’d have never been able to say who was who.

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as a secondary accompaniment to an already public meltdown. That was the first out of the three incidents, at the time of writing, where Lewis has sadly seen me shitting myself.

Despite this – and also at the time of writing this book – Lewis is still my best mate. We have been to the same nursery, primary school, secondary school, sixth-form college and university – and not even by design. We didn’t actually realise until ten days before uni that we were actually going to be on the same campus. We’ve just always, always ended up together; whether that be in education or in the photo booth where we took the pictures for the front cover of this book. (Lewis got paid in a Wagamama pumpkin katsu curry for doing so – not a chicken katsu curry, because, bravely, Lewis came out to me in 2017 as a fully fledged vegan.)

My dad was the one who usually did the school run with me.

He was a black cab driver in London, so he’d drop me off on his way to Heathrow airport, where he’d sit at the taxi rank for five hours with a Tupperware box full of warm cheeseand-pickle sandwiches – and not warm in a good way. We’d get out of the cab by my primary school at 8.30am, walk up to the school gates and he’d stand there with the school mums chatting shop and pretending to be one of the gals.

The school mums loved him, much to my own mum’s unenthusiastic ‘Well he’s actually quite an annoying bastard to live with.’

I guess chatting at the school gates was almost like his warm-up routine, a way to acclimatise to a day ahead trapped in a black box of a vehicle, where he might have 25

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the loveliest conversations with total strangers from around the world for a transitory period of time, or he might end up driving a total cunt for three hours from Heathrow to a creative branding agency in Soho.

But at the school gates my dad was happy – happy to have a job where he could at least drop his kid off at a nice school.

On Fridays he’d pick me up at home time. All us kids would come steaming out of school and he’d be at the gates with all his school-mum chums. My dad was fascinating to my peers, because he was a cab driver and a lot of other kids’ dads were bankers or solicitors or running to be a councillor. He’d make Lewis laugh by drawing a biro face on his index finger and thumb, cupping his hand and putting his false teeth in the middle, pretending his hand could talk, devising a new character for each toothy performance. I’m pretty sure one of the mums tried to book my dad as a party entertainer, but he swore far too much for that to be an appropriate booking.

I look back now and think how I was always really happy about my dad’s ability to have lots of healthy, friendly relationships with as many women as men. He taught me the importance of having a mixed friendship group.

I remember another dad at my primary school once having a very loud dig at his son for hanging out with too many girls. The worried look on a father’s face when he sees that his little boy wants to play mums and dads as opposed to ‘fucking kick everything you see in the playground until it

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breaks or bleeds’ is an upsetting phenomenon. It contributed to me also knowing that hanging around with too many girls either prompts the awkwardly polite ‘Oh . . . he’s just a bit sensitive’ comment or the impolite ‘He’s a bit poofy, ain’t he?’ or, even worse, ‘Ooh, he’s a ladies man!’ – all these comments describing a six-year-old child who can barely write their own name without getting one of the letters backwards.

As I’m writing this, I’m reminded of a beautiful thing that comedian John Bishop said on Jonathan Ross’s TV show in 2018. Both men have been very openly proud and visibly non-fussed about having gay children, which I’m grateful for. John said: ‘To the kids who are ten and eleven in the playground who are standing on their own who don’t know where they belong or what group they belong in, and try to play up to something or feel isolated, and to their parents who think, “I don’t know, my son doesn’t want to play football, he doesn’t fit in”, I just wanna say, “It’s OK.” Just love them for who they are and allow them to feel safe, and then those little digs and the little knocks and the little abuse that they subtly get that we just don’t know about, perhaps they won’t penetrate as deep.’

It was a wonderful thing to say on primetime telly. And he was sat on a sofa next to four-fifths of the Spice Girls and HRH Kylie Minogue, so the gays were definitely watching.

And whilst it did make me well up slightly and filled me with a feeling of love, it also made me think: John Bishop’s a DILF. I would actually!

My dad shared this openness to parenting.

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When I started secondary school, Dad would drop me off right in the school car park at the taxi rank, so people thought I was really rich and got cabs every day like the cool kids from west London. I’d royally wave, and call ‘Goodbye Driver!’ in an RP accent whilst he’d tell me to sod off and untuck my trousers from my socks.

I looked like a younger, chubbier version of him. Same unruly curly hair, same blue eyes, same crooked nose and teeth and the same overly expressive face when watching any film. Me and Dad watching a horror film were like Lee and Jenny who live in the static caravan on Gogglebox – all camp, terrified and shocked at even just a plate being put down on a table abruptly. I was a mini him and I spent the vast majority of my free time as a child out and about with Dad. Mum was very much someone I hung out with at home or at the shopping centre or at the big Tesco, whereas Dad was an adventurer – an explorer of sorts.

We would go on trips at least two or three times a month, visiting Dad’s mates in different parts of the UK in whatever dodgy motor he was doing up that month to sell on eBay, or going off-roading around muddy tracks in a cheap red Ford F-150 truck he bought when I was nine.

Every Saturday morning from the ages of about eleven to thirteen, my dad took me in his cab to a leisure park in Watford with a bowling alley that smelled like children’s feet, sweaty frankfurter sausages rolling on a rotating rack and employee malaise. I was a member of the Watford Youth Ten-pin Bowling Club and I was shit. I mean, really shit. There’d be seven-year-old girls bowling next to me getting five strikes 28